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The Global Eruption of US ImperialismThe assault on Yugoslavia was undertaken by the combined forces of NATO. But in its planning and execution, the war was an American enterprise. Not even Prime Minister Tony Blair's somewhat comical impersonation of Margaret Thatcher could conceal the fact that the United States, in the most literal sense, called the shots in this war.When the first cruise missiles were launched against Yugoslavia on March 24, it marked the fourth time in less than a year that the United States had bombed a foreign country. Earlier in the year, in pursuit of Saddam Hussein's phantom "weapons of mass destruction," the Clinton administration initiated a ferocious bombing campaign against Iraq. Indeed, the bombing of Iraq has become by now a permanent and routine feature of American foreign policy. The record of American military activity during the last 10 years is by any objective standard cause for astonishment and horror. A country that proclaims ad nauseam its love of peace has been engaged almost continuously in one or another military exercise beyond the borders of the United States. There have been no less than six major missions involving ground combat and/or bombing—Panama (1989), the Persian Gulf I (1990-91), Somalia (1992-93), Bosnia (1995), Persian Gulf II (1999) and Kosovo-Yugoslavia (1999). There has been, in addition, a series of occupations—Haiti (1994-), Bosnia (1995-) and Macedonia (1995-). The number of human beings who have lost their lives as the direct or indirect result of American military actions during the past decade is in the hundreds of thousands. Naturally, each of these episodes has been presented by the US government and media as "benevolent peacemaking". They are, in reality, objective manifestations of the increasingly militaristic character of American imperialism. There is an obvious and undeniable connection between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrogance and brutality with which the United States has pursued its international agenda throughout the 1990s. Substantial sections of the American ruling elite have convinced themselves that the absence of any substantial international opponent capable of resisting the United States offers an historically unprecedented opportunity to establish, through the use of military power, an unchallengeable position of global dominance.Unchecked by either external restraints or substantial domestic opposition, the mission of the United States is to remove all barriers to the reorganization of the world economy on the basis of market principles, as interpreted and dominated by American transnational corporations. It is only necessary, they argue, for the United States to overcome any inclination to squeamishness over the use of military power. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times put it shortly after the outbreak of the war against Yugoslavia: " The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist —McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.... Without America on duty, there will be no America Online." |
